Steve Martin and Martin Short took a sweet moment to remember their late friend and costar Catherine O’Hara.
Hours after news broke that the Home Alone actress had passed away on Friday at age 71, the duo raised a glass in a toast to her memory onstage during The Best of Steve Martin and Martin Short comedy show in Austin, Texas.
‘Catherine O’Hara, I met when she was 18 years of age,’ Short said while holding up his champagne flute, as seen in a TikTok video posted by a member of the audience.
A photo of Catherine O’Hara taken in 2019 showed on the big screen behind them.
‘And all these years later, she had been the greatest, most brilliant, kindest, sweetest angel that any of us worked with. So, God bless Catherine,’ the 75-year-old star concluded while Martin, 80, bowed his head in agreement.
Martin — who had to cancel two shows due to illness last September — clinked glasses with Short in O’Hara’s honor to the eruption of cheers from the crowd.
Martin worked with Catherine O’Hara in the 1994 film A Simple Twist of Fate, and Short also had the pleasure of working with the actress in Toronto’s Second City and SCTV.
Both Short and Catherine O’Hara provided voices for Tim Burton’s 2012 animated film Frankenweenie and they also were part of the voice cast of 2019’s The Addams Family.
The legendary Hollywood star of such film classics as Home Alone, Home Alone 2 and Beetlejuice passed away on Friday ‘at her home in Los Angeles following a brief illness,’ per a statement from her agency CAA.
According to audio dispatch obtained by the Daily Mail, the star was having ‘difficulty breathing’ before she was taken to the hospital.
A spokesperson for the Los Angeles Fire Department told the Daily Mail, ‘At 4:48 am we responded to a request for medical aid to that address and transported an approximately 70-year-old female in serious condition.’
Hours later, the actress was declared dead and her cause of death has yet to be released.
A number of tributes poured in on Friday following the news of the actress’s heartbreaking passing.
Macaulay Culkin took to Instagram to share a throwback photo of them in Home Alone as well as their 2023 reunion.
‘Mama. I thought we had time. I wanted more,’ he wrote in the caption. ‘I wanted to sit in a chair next to you. I heard you but I had so much more to say. I love you. I’ll see you later.’
Their final tearful reunion took place in December 2023 when O’Hara introduced the actor as he received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
O’Hara recently took on a role in Seth Rogen’s Apple TV+ series The Studio, and the actor also shared a tribute.
‘Really don’t know what to say… I told O’Hara when I first met her I thought she was the funniest person I’d ever had the pleasure of watching on screen. Home Alone was the movie that made me want to make movies. Getting to work with her was a true honor.
‘She was hysterical, kind, intuitive, generous… she made me want to make our show good enough to be worthy of her presence in it. This is just devastating. We’re all lucky we got to live in a world with her in it.’
Dan Levy, who starred in Schitt’s Creek, took to social media to share: ‘What a gift to have gotten to dance in the warm glow of Catherine O’Hara’s brilliance for all those years.’
Justin Theroux, who starred with O’Hara in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, shared a photo of O’Hara’s director chair. ‘Oh Catherine. You will be so so missed,’ Theroux wrote.
Brooke Shields, whom O’Hara impersonated on the Canadian comedy series SCTV, shared a few skits of O’Hara playing her.
‘What an honor it was to be spoofed by Catherine O’Hara,’ Shields shared, calling her death an ‘unfathomable loss.’
Many others shared their reflections on O’Hara’s life and legacy through moving tributes such as Eugene Levy, Michael Keaton, Francesca Scorsese, Pedro Pascal, and Jamie Lee Curtis.
O’Hara’s last public appearance was when she attended the Emmy Awards last year in September.
She is survived by her husband Bo Welch — whom she tied the knot with in 1992 — and their children Matthew, 32, and Luke, 29.